


Parasite's Temple

by zeldadestry



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Community: 100_women, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-10
Updated: 2006-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:14:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yes, the Winifred Burkle. She is the one who gave this life."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parasite's Temple

**Author's Note:**

> prompt 021, 'dirty', for 100_women fanfic challenge

The longer Illyria inhabits the Winifred Burkle, the more she begins to understand.

Yes, the Winifred Burkle. She is the one who gave this life. Once, Illyria only called her, thought of her as, the shell. When she grew to know the importance of names, especially for Wesley, she realized the shell and Winifred Burkle were one. Now she understands how much there was, how much she eradicated. The Winifred Burkle. Now when she speaks of her sister under the skin

(Sister, what is this? Where do these words and thoughts come from? They are not hers. They are weaving themselves in, thoughts of others, threads, covering her in burial shrouds she neither wants nor needs. The dead will assert themselves, she says, out loud, waking in the night, because now she needs to sleep. The needs of the humans, their wants and hopes are becoming her own. Even their dreams. Now she dreams and they are not her dreams, not the dreams of a being of decadent power and wrath. These are the dreams of a child, vulnerable and pure. Though once they sickened her, filthy in their sweet simplicity, nauseating in their piety, now they hurt her with their very brightness.)

she says it like this, like now, to pretty Charles.

(He should not be pretty to her, diminished as he is, moving slower, ever since the wound which nearly killed him. Stabbed twice in the gut, mewling weakling, and why does she hate that the first time was on her account? How could you do that, my sweet Wesley? He didn't know. Charles didn't know, and he was your friend, Wesley. How could you hurt your friend? Not in my name, no, I wouldn't have, I couldn't have wanted that.)

"My dreams are not my own. They belong to the Winifred Burkle."

"Stop it," he says, he always says. "We called her Fred. That was her name."

"But she was THE Winifred Burkle," Illyria argues, because though it sometimes amuses, it mostly angers her when they do not accept her every declaration as an ultimatum. Now she must bother to demonstrate the proof of her truths, as though he were her idiot child.

(Yet no child ever had eyes like his. Eyes that have seen the seemingly inevitable apocalypse diverted, refuted, time and time again. He has seen the waves of destruction ebb away, he has fought for it. Yet no sister will rise again to call him brother. No the Winifred Burkle to call him Charles. Why can they withstand the might and multitude of demonic armies and yet fail to hold on to their own flesh? But she knows this, knows that to maintain is impossible. Everything must change. Those are the rules. Destruction, creation, they are the same, and which occurs does not matter because both involve the alteration of the world. The world must be altered, continuously, constantly. She knows this. It is the Winifred Burkle that makes her forget, that makes her wish to cling. Everything once lived or died at her command. Once. Once.)

"Did you ever love another Winifred Burkle?"

"No."

"Did you ever know another?"

"No."

"She was the one, the only one. She was THE Winifred Burkle."

"Don't." He cries, sitting in the chair, his bare torso marked with thick smooth scars. When the flesh is cut away, what grows over the hole is not the same. It is shiny, hairless skin, like wearing the flesh of the inside on the outside of the body. He is covering his eyes with his hands and when she touches his scars, he does not even feel it. The nerves have been scraped away, too.

"Charles," she says, and she uses the voice that is not her own, nor the Winifred Burkle's. It is the voice of the sorrow both share, the voice of the spaces, the chambers, where the host and the parasite both echo. Yes, she knows now. At first she believed that what she gave the Winifred Burkle was a great honor, infusing her crippled body (for all humans are cripples, their futile crawl, their inescapable disintegration) with the glory of a being beyond space and time and death. Now she knows it was desecration. Now she knows and must live trapped in this sanctuary she defiled. "She is gone, but I am here."

"It's not the same."

"No, it's not." He lets her take his hands in her own, lets her pull them away from his face, so that he can see, see her. "I will never leave you." When she kisses him, she wraps her arms around him. There is a temple here, when his arms encircle her, hold her close, a power and grace that no omnipotence, no omniscience, was ever able to provide. Some humans refuse to be cursed by their inevitable fade. He goes on, knowing he can be rent at any moment, ripped in half, knowing he may suffer for all hours of each day until death comes to release him. He goes on, he is strong to go on. As long as he lives, she will follow.


End file.
